site.btaKaradayi: MRF Not in Crisis, Can Steadily Be Second or Third Political Force

In a Bulgarian National Television (BNT) interview on Sunday morning, Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) outgoing Chairman Mustafa Karadayi flatly denied that his party was in a crisis and argued that it was quite normal for holders of elective political office to be replaced.

The Q&A was Karadayi's first media appearance since his surprising resignation as MRF Chairman on November 7, 2023. He also stepped down as MRF co-floor leader, leaving Delyan Peevski as the sole head of the party's parliamentary group.

On January 3, MRF founder and Honorary Chair Ahmed Dogan suggested that the party's top leadership should be shared between Peevski and MP Dzhevdet Chakarov.

In 2021 Peevski was designated by the US under the Global Magnitsky Act as an oligarch who "has regularly engaged in corruption, using influence peddling and bribes to protect himself from public scrutiny and exert control over key institutions and sectors in Bulgarian society." The MP is challenging the designation in a US court. His lawyers argue that there is no evidence of any wrongdoing by their client.

Asked by the BNT interviewer on Sunday who will be running the MRF: Chakarov or Peevski, Karadayi said that there are various groups of Movement members: "a new generation of more practically minded people, much more ambitious, impatient to fulfil their ambitions, even commercially, who want everything to happen right now and here, but there are also generations who survived the "regeneration process", the victims of ethnic-based repressions, concentration camps, internal exile and forced emigration, the expulsion of their close ones." He was referring to an internationally condemned campaign of Bulgaria's Communist regime in the early 1980s to force the local Muslim minority to adopt Slavic names, limit their religious activity, and refrain from speaking Turkish in public.
 
Asked whether Peevski will succeed in boosting the MRF's political influence, Karadayi said that the MRF does not set itself a strategic target to be a first political force but can steadily claim the second or third place.

"A person gets worn out with time, a fatigue has built up from my being in the party, and it so happens that there is a new generation of younger politicians who position themselves in elective office in the party and must get a chance to advance," the interviewee said, asked why he resigned as leader of the Movement.

Commenting on Dogan's words that the MRF is poised to become "a corporate partisan organization working for payment," Karadayi said that "there are certain structures that work only for financing" but would not elaborate.

Challenged to say whether the MRF is part of the "assemblage", Karadayi said that his party had backed the Government in order to show that, even though they are not in it, this is what can possibly be done for political stability in Bulgaria at this point. "Assemblage" is a household name for an informal power-sharing scheme between the two largest parliamentary groups, Continue the Change-Democratic Bulgaria and GERB-UDF.

"We currently don't claim to have ministers and deputy ministers of our own, but the MRF is not an NGO, it is a political party, and by definition parties are power-seeking public organizations, the MP said, adding that "this is one more reason why the MRF is trying to expand."